The 10% I Rarely Reach
10%
Today, one of my perpetually tardy students came in. I left my door open and, as usual, I let him in without little fanfare, because it’s not a situation I need to do a lot of yelling for. I told him good morning. He reciprocated. After I got to walking around, I noticed a student passing him work that had little relevance to math. Without yelling, I told the parties, “I need you to get back to work.” They nodded and waited until I walked away. However, I noticed they continued to make it a discussion that, frankly, took them away from the task at hand. I can understand the worry of not having homework done in the class, but there’s this pressing urgency I have in my class because I know the skills necessary for them to get to high school in mathematically sound shape.
This doesn’t matter much to the student; rather, he wanted to complete someone else’s assignment in my class and told me under no uncertain terms that he wasn’t going to do my work at all. I nodded and simply stated that both the giver and recipient of homework (that they ought not copy from one another anyways) would have this
